The Girl Who Broke the Rules

by Marnie Riches

  Bit by bit, he had ripped his sheet into long strips, making cuts in the fabric initially by gnawing at the cotton using only his sharp incisors. His gums had now begun to bleed and were sore as hell. He had never paid much attention to the upkeep of his dental hygiene, it was true. But it had worked, at least, and his oral wellbeing was the last thing on his mind.

  Knotting the pieces was easy. His father had been a keen sailor and had taught him the very strongest knots, which he had learned to tie with the dedication and precision of a small boy who admired his father more than any other human being on earth. The moot point was whether his home-made rope would take his weight.

  ‘Only one way to try,’ he said.

  Fashioning the noose was tricky, with all those knotted sections, but he managed that too. Then, tying one end of the rope to the bars on the window, he moved the bed beneath the window itself. Put the noose around his neck. Got the tension just right. Time to jump.

  Obviously, he cried a great deal, as he teetered on the edge of the bed. He didn’t really want to bring his shoddy, sordid, insignificant life to an end like this at all. Though he grappled with the monster inside, who made him do the bad things, he had always been a survivor in the face of shocking odds. In fact, even despite his fall from grace, there was much about his life that he found great enjoyment in. But he appreciated that, although the monster could do time, Ruud Ahlers, the chubby doctor who felt remorse and whose good intentions underpinned some of the shittier things he had done, was not strong enough as a person to go to prison for even a year. And he would never, ever be safe from the Italians, The Duke and The Butcher. Their reach extended through thick prison walls, he knew.

  No more internal debate. In many ways, as karmic payback for what he had done to all those vulnerable people, he deserved this. Yes. The monster had not won, after all.

  ‘Get on with it, you fucking idiot,’ he told himself.

  Then, he jumped.

  CHAPTER 65

  Ashford, Kent, later

  ‘So you think you can say jump and I say how high? Is that how you think this rolls?’ Letitia said, stirring her Jack Daniel’s and Coke too quickly so that droplets of drink flew onto the table, making George cringe.

  She stared at her mother. Noticed how she had gone big like Aunty Sharon. Really big. Though she was still as glamorous as ever in the batwing sequinned number, with her face full of war paint and a caramel blonde weave that must have set her back hundreds. Fun-fur slung over the back of the chair. Ghettofabulous in The County Hotel. Ashford Wetherspoons’ answer to Gloria Gaynor. She stuck out like a sore thumb topped by an impressive diamanté-studded nail extension.

  ‘You were the one wanted to see me, remember?’ George said, wondering how van den Bergen was doing in the nearby café. Wanting to wipe up the sticky Coke spillage.

  ‘Yeah, but this ain’t no time of day to be meeting and having a mother-daughter heart to heart,’ she said, slurping her drink noisily through a straw. Fuchsia lipstick on the black plastic and her teeth. ‘I’m on lates, innit? This my bedtime, nowadays. I got myself a career.’

  Stifling the urge to throw the drink in Letitia’s face, George shut her down with silence. Drank her coffee. Considered her words.

  ‘What do you want, Letitia?’

  ‘I don’t want nothing off you, cheeky bitch.’

  Oh, yes. Her mother was all feisty indignation now, with her pouting lips and head bobbing from side to side. Got her back up good and proper, though George felt certain there would be an ask for money somewhere along the line. Mum tax.

  Call her bluff.

  Rising out of her seat, George drained her coffee and set the cup back down – a metaphorical full stop to the proceedings. She knew this reluctant rendezvous had been a mistake.

  ‘Sit down for Christ’s sakes.’

  ‘Since when did you tell me what to do?’ George said. ‘Unless you hadn’t noticed, I’m a grown adult.’

  Letitia sucked at her JD and Coke. ‘You so fucking uptight, these days. That how living my sister working out for you? You found some sort of domestic bliss with your old Aunty Sharon cos she scrubs her floors more than I ever did? Nice. You must have been one of them alien kids swapped at birth, like a changing or something, cos I never understood how you ended up mine.’

  ‘Changeling. It’s a bloody changeling. And don’t bring Aunty Sharon into this,’ George said, looking down at this woman who had raised her. Once, she had sought comfort in those substantial arms. Luxuriated in the familiar motherly scent of rose water during the week or, at weekends, her market stall perfume. Like Calvin Klein’s Eternity but not quite. Now Letitia just felt like a mother but not quite. ‘Look, I’ve got a plane to catch. I’m living in Amsterdam at the moment. So, whatever you’ve got to say, spit it out or…or just stop wasting my time.’

  ‘I’m getting married,’ Letitia said. ‘Me and Leroy. We getting married.’

  George looked her mother in the eye but had been rendered speechless. Opened and closed her mouth. Mommie Dearest was going to be Mrs Leroy, enthusiastic step-mother to her two step-Leroys. Happy new families, where her old family had failed. George felt like a small girl, being pushed out of the number one spot, though she was now a woman. Realised she had jettisoned their relationship a long, long time ago. But as a child, she and Letitia had been a team of two. They had seen George’s father only infrequently, when he was back in the country. Letitia had sheltered her small daughter from the slings and arrows of poverty and semi-abandonment. Best Mum in the World mug said it was so. Food on the table. Help with her homework. Pot plants on the kitchen windowsill. Even a garden, once they had moved from the high rise to the house. Sweet, before it had all turned sour and something had curdled within Letitia – coincidentally at the time George had started to blossom in her final years of junior school and the flower of Letitia’s youth had begun to fade in earnest. Daddy Dearest, off the scene for good.

  ‘Congratulations. I’m glad you’ve found happiness.’ The words caught in George’s throat.

  ‘Ta.’ Letitia drained her drink. ‘Sharon says you still with that Dutch boy. How’s that working out for you?’

  George shrugged noncommittally.

  Unexpectedly, Letitia reached out and squeezed her shoulder. ‘You buy me another drink, I’ll impart you with some motherly fucking wisdom, right?’ She held her empty glass out.

  Though it was freezing, they sat in the beer garden, smoking. Letitia looking like a giant mountain lion in her fun-fur, with that mane of hair. George, feeling old and grey. The wine helped a little. She could feel the tension seeping out of her shoulders.

  Letitia the Dragon sucked hard on her cigarette. Breathed blue-yellow smoke out of her nostrils.

  ‘I ain’t never seen you looking so pissed off in years,’ she told George.

  ‘That’s because you haven’t seen me in years.’

  ‘Save the attitude for someone who gives a shit. It’s the boy. I can see it in your eyes.’ She flicked her ash onto the ground. Tap, tap with shining nails too long and slender for her short, fat fingers.

  Aligning her lighter perfectly with the edge of her cigarette packet, George scoffed. ‘You think because you’re getting married that you’re suddenly qualified as an agony aunt, sniffing out the broken hearted so you can dispense advice like paracetamol? I am not gonna discuss my relationship with you.’

  ‘Sharon told me you’re having a thing on the side with that detective.’

  ‘Fuck you.’ George stared into her already depleted wine glass. Could feel the heat in her cheeks.

  ‘Listen,’ Letitia said, lighting a new cigarette off the glowing end of her spent one. ‘Let me tell you a story about me and your father, right?’ Moved a strand of blonde hair carefully out of her eye. ‘I loved your dad in the beginning, yeah? Even though there wasn’t no clouds bashing together or forked lightning or none of that shit. Me and him got it together one rainy Saturday, after a night at the Brixton Academ
y. Simple as. Nothing celestial. You know the story, don’t you?’

  George nodded.

  ‘Anyway, I never thought it would amount to fuck all, him being a university dickhead and all. He was always meant to be just a one night stand. Except he wasn’t. And then very quickly, you came along by accident. But you know, me and your dads weren’t never gonna find happiness together, because we wasn’t right for each other. We fought like cat and dog. The chemistry was all wrong. I ignored my gut feelings.’ She chuckled and hugged her fun-fur tight around her. ‘We fancied each other at first – man, he was fine looking. And he loved you. But he had a temper on him, the sulky bastard.’

  George raised an eyebrow. ‘He had a temper on him?’

  Letitia ignored her. ‘We just couldn’t get along, and this thing we’d committed to was tearing us both apart on the inside. Splitting was the most sensible thing we ever did.’ She looked wistfully up at the back wall of the pub. Her breath steamed on the cold air even without cigarette smoke in her lungs. ‘Then, he fucks off and marries that tart from Spain, of course, and that’s the last we seen of him.’ She frowned. Cleared her throat and shook her head, as though trying to rid herself of painful memories. ‘But still, I don’t regret cutting him loose.’ She grabbed George by the chin and made her meet her uncomfortably direct gaze. ‘And you shouldn’t neither with Dutch boy. If it ain’t working, you ain’t doing either of yous any favours. Life’s too short, love. And you don’t know what good things are round the corner. Especially not you, with your smart future all ahead of you.’

  George wrenched her chin from Letitia’s grip. Contemplated in silence what might lie just around the corner from her and Ad.

  ‘I am proud, you know. I keep up with what you doing through your aunty.’

  A tear forced its way out of George’s left eye and began a slow, solitary journey down the side of her face. But she didn’t want Letitia to see any emotion, so she acted like it wasn’t there. Headed back inside. Busying her mother with movement and the transfer of her chattels from the weather-beaten beer garden table to a spot where they were now surrounded by pensioners coming in for an early dinner. Curry Club aficionados at The County Hotel.

  ‘You finished?’ George asked, once she was certain that her voice would be even and strong.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d want to come to the—’

  ‘No. Don’t bother inviting me. I can’t afford an extra flight back at the moment.’

  ‘Oh.’ Letitia looked into her drink. Crestfallen.

  Here it was. George could feel it coming.

  ‘That’s a shame. Cos what with the wedding plans and all costing so fucking much, I wondered if you could—’

  ‘What? Lend you some cash?’ She swallowed down, along with the dregs of her warm chardonnay, memories of her time in prison, passing empty days in her ill-fitting tracksuit, listening to the anguished wailing of her fellow inmates while she curled up into a tight ball on her thin mattress in an empty, godforsaken cell; her time as one of the girls, running the gauntlet in hi-tops through the estate with the police on their heels. All of it down to Letitia. Selling her own daughter too cheaply, using Taiwanese handbags and her own freedom as the currency. Even after all these years, the skin was still raw beneath the barely formed scab. ‘You don’t fucking change,’ she said.

  Letitia opened her mouth to come back, no doubt, with some wise-ass remark. Paused abruptly, staring at something or somebody over George’s shoulder. Several of the other drinkers in that hackneyed, homogenous pub interior were also staring.

  Turning around, George saw van den Bergen, eye-catching at six feet five with that shock of white hair, stalking across the pub with an urgency that befitted the harried expression on his face.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked him.

  He spoke rapidly in Dutch. ‘We’ve got to go. Get on an earlier flight if we can.’

  Letitia was out of her seat.

  ‘Listen, Mr Jolly Green Giant, chatting foreign like I ain’t even—’

  ‘Shut it, Letitia,’ George said. Grabbed van den Bergen’s arm. ‘What? What is it?’

  He picked her coat off the back of her chair and held it in readiness for their departure. ‘I got a call off Elvis. There’s been another in Amsterdam. A child, this time.’

  CHAPTER 66

  Cambodia, 1992

  The young prostitute looked terrified. Naked, bound and gagged, now, she wriggled in her seat. Making the muffled sounds of a desperate woman, scraping the chair along the bare floor as best she could. Though, should anyone in the neighbouring rooms be trying to eavesdrop, the sound would undoubtedly be camouflaged by the buzz of mopeds and bells ringing frantically, as men cycled their tuk-tuks on the bustling street below.

  Wide-eyed, Veronica could see their captive was appealing to her, woman-to-woman, to be freed.

  ‘Now, I’m going to stop, and I want to watch you strangle her,’ Silas said, withdrawing his still-erect penis. He started to masturbate instead. Moved to the prostitute to caress the scarred stump of her right leg. Kicked her crude prosthetic limb out of the way.

  ‘You want me to what? What the hell are you saying, Silas?’ Veronica asked, rolling onto her back, panting. Beneath her, the grubby bed was damp with their sweat. Even with the shutters half closed, the humidity and heat were stifling. Flies throwing themselves against the badly distempered walls, believing that that way lay the sun. Above her, the ceiling fan made a half-hearted attempt at circulating the foetid air. ‘It’s too hot for this.’ She wriggled around to change her orientation on the wet bed. Tried to grab his elbow and pull him to her but he was beyond her reach. ‘Just come back here and finish me off. Stop messing around.’

  ‘I’m not messing around. I want you to choke the life out of her. Believe me, it’s the best high you’ll ever experience, my darling. I want to share it with you. Then, we’re going to cut her up and dispose of her body. These whores are ten-a-penny. They have a dreadful, demeaning life. We’ll be doing her and her family a favour. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices for the greater good.’

  Veronica sat up abruptly. Staring at her lover in disbelief. Had Papa been right about him?

  ‘I don’t want you seeing him any more,’ Papa had said. Stern in his white coat. Addressing her at his Harley Street practice between appointments with rich old hags to discuss how he was going to fix up their pendulous breasts or administer a discreet nip and tuck to their collapsing faces. Dismissive, as usual. Immediately turning his attention to a small oil painting that he had been taking out of its packaging. A little treat for his office wall from Bonhams, no doubt. Keeping Mama’s legacy alive. What a fucking joke.

  ‘I’m not a child any more,’ Veronica had said, digging her nails into the gold leaf on the visitor’s chair. Spattering her nappa Ralph Laurens with gold dust. ‘I can make my own choices. I love Silas.’ Why had she even been sitting there, making excuses to this disengaged automaton?

  ‘Veronica, he’s not for you. He’s too old. He’s not in our league.’

  ‘But he’s good enough to work with you, right? You’re such a hypocrite, Dad.’

  ‘He worked for me. Don’t call me Dad.’ Her father, Papa Alpha, donned his glasses and looked down his nose at her.

  ‘Or what? What the hell can you do about it, if I call you Dad or keep seeing Silas?’

  ‘I can stop your allowance.’

  He had had a point, the old man. Life without the allowance would be intolerable. The trust fund Mama had set up for her was pitiful. At twenty-one, she had inherited a shitty Chevvy and a cramped, tumbledown shack in the Hamptons that was no more than 2000 square feet. The bulk of the money and property had become the sole preserve of her father. Other than what he deigned to give her as an allowance, she wouldn’t get a bean out of the old bastard until he died. And that was providing he didn’t hook up with some Hollywood starlet in the interim and leave it all to her or some new-age, third-eye bullshit factory in the Hills. />
  ‘Okay! Okay!’ she had said. Holding up her hands in surrender. ‘I’ll let him down gently.’

  He had given the command and had expected her to obey. Of course, she hadn’t. She had exited his consultation rooms with her flight ticket in her handbag. Had the driver take her straight to Heathrow, where she had met up with Silas under the departures board, Cambodia-bound. A passionate kiss bonding them in their worthy subterfuge.

  At the other end, she had been surprised by the primitive feel of the place. Even when she had taken herself off to explore what Papa had stipulated as no-go neighbourhoods in New York, she had never seen such dereliction before as in Phnom Penh. Fat black electrical cables strung from one side of the street to another between crumbling 60s low-rise blocks, like a giant, intricate cat’s cradle. A child dressed in filthy rags, squatting in the street and defecating into open drains. Makeshift food stalls with colourful awnings that said this was a ghost city only just being reclaimed. The place had an honesty to it.

  When they had made for the train, bound for the spot where the charity was currently clearing mines, Silas had put his arm around her.

  ‘What do you think, my love?’ he had asked, kissing her forehead. Leading her along the tracks, overgrown with grass. Pushing the peasants out of the way as they tried to hawk food on platters they were carrying on their heads to the passengers. Helping her onto the packed train, along with the small suitcase that they were sharing.

  Though she was wilting from the combination of jetlag and intense heat, she was intoxicated. The sunshine seemed stronger here. She was fascinated by the sound of people talking animatedly in a language that was completely foreign to her. Could smell their poverty and the vitality that came with it, pungent on the air. So different from the over-indulged westerners her parents mixed with – sickly sweet, white patricians, poisoning everything around them with their own narcotic-fed malignancies. ‘It’s amazing. This is the real world. I can’t believe it, Silas. I feel free.’ She pointed to the Cambodian men who were perched on the top of the carriages. ‘I want to go on the roof!’